Mark waxes on transparency, but I am not sure I agree with how he constructed the story.

I would have just gotten to the point: Transparency is only a first step. It is not the end. The goal is meaningful information in the hands of customers/users, allowing them to make informed decisions.

Amazingly, in the first comment in a bug report, Microsoft dodges the question and passes the buck.

I hit this bug when working with a Sitecore web site. For example, I have a path like this:

C:\XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX\raw\WebSite\App_Data\MediaFiles\{11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111}\{3D6658D8-A0BF-4E75-B3E2-D050FABCF4E1}\{15451229-7534-44EF-815D-D93D6170BFCB}\{700C2C14-6082-4378-AA43-821E8422E9BE}\{6507E0E5-6CF2-4342-A11F-68F787B32EA3}Boulevard.jpg

That is 259 characters. I can’t delete it with PowerShell’s Remove-Item command.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: use legacy command prompt tools. In my case, I am trying to remove everything below C:\XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX\raw\, so I can use this command in PowerShell:

cmd /c rmdir C:\XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX\raw\ /s/q

But I shouldn’t have to do this. There is no reason that PowerShell can’t delete files with more than 248 character paths.

Not doing all that much…

All your Visual Studio setup experiences are belong to Microsoft? (Explanation if this phrase doesn’t make sense.)

15 years? I’m scratching my head. The Web 2.0 is relevant today. E.g., Facebook has over 400 million users right now. Fifteen years from now passes through several generations of new technology!

For Colony’s sake, I hope CMS Wire misquoted or he misspoke. I’ll tweet him and see what he says.

We did it over Skype. I didn’t have good equipment, so I had to put my face about 4″ from the microphone on my son’s Asus netbook. If you listen to the interview, you’ll hear disturbances in the audio. I guess I leaned too closely or breathed into it?

The Russian subway bombing prevented them from playing it in the London breakfast show, but it played a few times before their dawn.

The interview.

The full 27 minute segment I was on. (I think I am towards the end.)

This plain text belies my excitement, but this was a major high for me. I cannot believe I’ve been broadcasted on wordwide media.

I just bought a new printer. Here’s the thought process.

I rejected Canon, Epson, and Brother out of hand:

• Canon: Saw too many problems with Bubblejet printers back in my tech support days. My current printer, a Canon Pixma MP-970, is junk. Ink’s too pricey, and Canon rigged it to drink ink in duplex mode. Driver feel like they were rushed out before usability testing. After just 2 years old, prints shift so that vertical lines aren’t straight anymore.
• Epson: That company’s ’80s and ’90s dot matrix printers were horrible. Never found one that fed paper consistently. Quality was so inconsistent that I trusted my 9 pin Panasonic KX-P1191 over any Epson 24-pin.
• Brother: Another hard-to-trust brand after owning a fax machine in the late ’90s with intentionally costly print consumables.

OK, I really didn’t reject totally, but they started out with huge demerits. Consumer Reports didn’t consistently rate either brand well, so they’re done.

So I was down to a few HP models and a Lexmark.

An hour of “analysis by paralysis” narrowed me to the HP OfficeJet 8500 and the Lexmark Platinum Pro905. Mathematically, either’s lower print costs were worth the premium over otherwise good HP Photosmart models. The 8500 would pay for itself after only 7 reams of paper.

I finally rejected the Lexmark. It had too many mediocre reviews and customer gripes. Sounds like Lexmark would have been good if not for incompetent R&D and software architects.

So now I have a HP OfficeJet 8500 waiting at some Amazon.com facility for my shipping label. Better yet, HP is paying me $75 for my old Canon! Can’t wait to get rid of it!

The host is interviewing Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, a British medical journal recently made (in)famous for feeding the vaccine/autism hoax.

The editor says The Lancet must be more careful in the future.

Translation: more of The Lancet‘s future articles will support the status quo. This will reduce hoaxes, but it crowds out legitimate alternative theories.

Are academic journals even relevant? Whatever relevancy they have is mainly because the research community is clinging to an outdated model. And let’s don’t forget these wickedly expensive journals have their own fiscal incentive to perpetuate themselves.

Research is living and constantly evolving. Why then rely on a content delivery method that can only create frozen, dead documents? Where corrections require new, frozen documents? This is silly.

Some say if we don’t have journals, we effectively lose the peer review process because respected academics aren’t the gatekeepers. Hardly. Wikipedia’s not perfect, but it shows that a completely open model, that even allows anonymous editing, can produce highly reliable information. Services like the Educause-sponsored academia.edu show it shouldn’t be hard to limit involvement just to the research community–not to the “select few” researchers but the entire community. This increases veracity by at least an order of magnitude.

Richard Horton said that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the originator of the fraudulent research, was respected politically and academically for years, and his words were taken as “gospel truth.”

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Doesn’t this sound like James Hansen, Al Gore, IPCC, etc.? All of whom deliver polemic research so political, agenda-driven, and error-full that people are stating to question the scientific basis of global warming?

Drupal apparently thinks enterprise is just performance. That misses other important factors where Drupal falls on its face. For example:

• It’s security model is stuck in a departmental model. At my work, we looked into an enterprise Drupal calendar, but we passed because it requires fantastic workarounds just to roughly approximate enterprise security.
• Manageability is improving with the Aegir hosting system, but this just simplifies base management tasks. Enterprise Drupal is still a collection of discrete, departmental-class web systems, each of which has substantially independent configuration.

Drupal has its place in the enterprise for certain departmental solutions. But it’s a huge stretch to intimate that Drupal is “enterprise software.”

If you surf it, you’ll see asp file extensions. For example: http://www.texasgop.org/inner.asp?z=6

That means the Texas GOP’s runs its brand new site on a kludge CMS!

“Woah, Aren, isn’t that severe?”

No.

ASP’s most recent version is from 1999.

Microsoft replaced it with ASP.Net 1.0 in January 2002. ASP.Net is now on 3.5, and 4.0 is around the corner.

Vendors still delivering classic ASP code in November 2009 have colossally failed to invest or innovate and may be incompetent.

When I review products, those still on ASP start out such a disadvantage that they’ll probably never make the selection.

What is up with the Texas GOP? How did it get hoodwinked into a kludge CMS?